ARM Cortex-A15 cores are coming to smart phones and tablets in late 2012 or early 2013, packing up to 16 cores clocked at up to 2.5 GHz. Early designs will likely only have two to four cores. (Source: The Gadget Guy)

The latest round of cutting edge smart phones like the Atrix 4G use Cortex A9 processors, which can only be clocked up to 2 GHz (and current designs are much slower than that). (Source: Geeky Gadget)

Release the Cortex A15!

James
Bruce, the U.S. mobile segment manager at ARM Holdings (ARMH), announced this week
another important step in ARM's plans to try to further dethrone the veteran
x86 and become the world's most used computer architecture.

I. Superpower Smartphones Almost Here

Starting late next year or in early 2013, Mr. Bruce announced this
week, smartphones, tablets, and possibly laptops using ARM's new Cortex A15
core will go on sale. Initially the chips will be dual-core designs, but
the architecture supports up to 16 cores. The cores can be clocked at up
to 2.5GHz.

But aside from bumping the core count and the speed, Cortex A15 delivers
numerous architectural improvements that should bump power performance and
increase the efficiency of parallel processing on mobile devices.

The Cortex A15 design was previously announced
in September, but this was the first time concrete availability information
has aired.

But ARM Holding's Mr. Bruce says that Qualcomm is already moving to a 28-nm
process and will soon be joined by the other licensees. Intel currently
is at the 45 nm node, for its
latest Atom (Lincroft) mobile designs.

By 2013 ARM will likely be on the 22 nm node as well.

Mr. Bruce says that his company won't target the server market, which it calls
a "legacy" market, till 2014. Many are looking forward to ARM
servers, as they would offer a very power efficient, presumably affordable RISC
alternative to x86 designs. And with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) announcing that it would
support ARM with Windows 8, the possibility that future version of Windows
Server will support ARM seems strong.

In the meantime Mr. Bruce says that ARM Holdings and its partners will continue
to focus on mobile devices like smart phones and tablets. He says he is
excited about new "convertible" designs
like the Motorola Atrix 4G, which transform a smartphone into an impromptu
Android netbook.

He also says that future ARM-powered devices will be capable of streaming video
over Bluetooth to your television. He states, "The interesting thing
in the smartphone space is the small screen coming to the big screen."

“So far we have not seen a single Android device that does not infringe on our patents." -- Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith